We made a late start on day 3 of our Ruta 40 drive. Soft comfy beds make it much easier to do that than hard ground and 7mm foam mats. We had been looking forward to breakfast as the night before the owner had said that they made their own bread so they charged for breakfast . In these kinds of places it's usually included so we assumed this meant it would be good. It wasn’t. Two measly slices of toast each, cold coffee and some jam. No juice or anything else. Useless.

Liz was very excited about our first stop. A hydroelectric dam. It wasn’t on the way but I wanted to go see it as it was mentioned in the book. It was a nice drive out but was so bloody windy when we got there it was hard to get out of the car! It wasn’t all that impressive in the end being a huge gravel dam rather than the so much cooler concrete ones. Back on the road again and we started to just churn up the miles. The emptiness of the scenery is incredible and although the paved roads are a little less exciting than the gravel it does make it less tiring to drive and give your eyes chance to stop looking for potholes and big rocks and admire the surroundings

. We decided to take a detour that night to a lake to camp. Not far out of our way on the map it looked. Just 100km on a gravel road! The place was Lago General Vintter and it is right on the border with Chile. The weather started to look worse as we got closer and our thoughts of camping on the lakeside didn’t look too inviting. Thankfully there was actually a campsite all the way out here which had great little sheltered space with a shelter for cooking and an area for a fire. We got ourselves all set up with fire and all and had another great pasta dinner. We took a 2 second trip to the lakeside in the dark but the wind was so fierce and cold we didn’t stay long. It looked very menacing with waves crashing in the dark and the whites of the mountains looming beyond. We went back and climbed into our tent glad for the shelter of the trees and tried to sleep with the wind howling around us.